A Bee Meets BACnet

Fri, Aug 30, 2019

What does a bee have to do with BACnet? Good question. You know the S4 Group is located in Utah, and Utah is known as the Beehive State. Well, we have been busy as bees working on our new product and are proud to present our new S4 Hive Box that brings smart WIFI Thermostats from ecobee to existing BACnet infrastructures in commercial buildings.

The smart ecobee thermostats deliver advanced comfort and control to buildings. An ecobee thermostat gives the user a cool user interface for easy control of the HVAC, lighting and other gadgets in the building. In the latest version the Thermostat also comes with voice control. It uses WiFi to connect to the ecobee cloud services and local wireless communications to connect to temperature and occupancy Sensors. Equipped with this data, the cloud service uses smart algorithms to save up to 23% of energy for a building.

The new S4 Hive Box brings all these goodies to commercial buildings equipped with the global ISO standard BACnet. One S4 Hive can connect to several ecobee Thermostats and publish them to BACnet. The thermostats and all of their sensors now automatically appear in the BACnet Network of the building. This integration does not require time-consuming configuration; just bring in the S4 Box, authorize the ecobee site and you will automatically see all the ecobees on your BACnet network!

The S4 Group will be performing interoperability testing on the S4 Hive with multiple BACnet clients at this year’s Plugfest commercial availability will soon follow.